[clbuild-devel] RfC: SBCL with rlwrap and sb-aclrepl

[David Lichteblau]

Quoting Tobias C. Rittweiler (tcr at freebits.de):
> I just had the idea that it might make sense if clbuild built its sbcl
> such that it includes rlwrap and automatically uses sb-aclrepl.
> 
> How do people feel about this?

I'm interested in usability improvements.

My design choices would be sligthly different in the following respects:

  - I've recently published a portable fork of sb-aclrepl, called PREPL
    (for "Portable REPL").  I'd prefer using this portable library over
    an SBCL contrib.  (The unportable bits are handled by a lower-level
    library: conium, which is a feature-reduced fork of swank-backend
    for use in hemlock and prepl).

  - Although rlwrap is a nice trick, there is also linedit, which
    provides the same capabilities written in portable Lisp, which I
    think is more interesting.

  - The SBCL built my 'clbuild compile-implementation sbcl' should be an
    upstream SBCL.  (The only non-upstream thing we do is to enable
    threads, and I would argue that since upstream ships its *binaries* with
    that feature and just hasn't enabled it in the sources, that a
    reasonable deviation.)

    It might go a bit far to load extra ASDF systems.

Since I don't want to override the normal repl in "clbuild lisp", I
have instead added a command "clbuild prepl".

By default prepl is loaded at run time.  Users who want it built into
their image for improved start up speed can dump a monster.core.

Proposal:

Perhaps it would be nice to enable linedit in "clbuild prepl" by
default?  (Note that "clbuild prepl" also works on other Lisps, in
particular Clozure.  We should see to it that the linedit feature is
either supported by those Lisps, or enabled only if running on SBCL).


d.